rheaitis

 While my father was here for my birthday, we visited the Sudha Cars Museum, which is primarily a display of Mad Engineer Builds Cars. It also has a lovely little WWII reconstruction corner, including the cycles and motorcycles that paratroopers used to jump with, which consist of a collapsible frame and very sparse engine but must still have added substantially to the weight of their packs. It was delightful to imagine the Band of Brothers people biking on things that came up barely to knee-height on me.

It also had two reconstructed Silver Ghosts, from 1922 and 1934, cars with which Peter Wimsey must have been exceedingly familiar. They're such huge stunning things, even if one can see why cars of the time were used as phallic metaphors.

 I wondered whether to reserve this for Wednesday and try and do that as a regular thing, but frankly I either read for my thesis or I read fanfic, so no. I did stumble into a new-ish obsession and--as is usual for me--have now consumed a lot of it.

dira has been discussing Band of Brothers on her tumblr a bit, and I was freaking out about writing so I pirated the first couple episodes on... Wednesday night or Thursday morning. It is now Saturday night and I have watched eight episodes, read Ambrose's book (that it is based on), a follow-up and bio of Dick Winters by Larry Alexander (Biggest Brother), obtained Bill Guarnere's book, and read a cumulative 250k+ of fic, the largest chunk of it a whopping 150k of post-war domesticity starring, not Winters/Nixon (the obvious otp) but Speirs/Lipton. I read it before I'd watched them have so much as a conversation, but having seen eps. 7 & 8, I do very much now ship it.

fwiw, Dick Winters Actual thought the show made him look queer, and was affably disgruntled about it (having seen the scenes concerned, I gotta say, man is in the right there); I dunno whether anyone asked either Speirs or Lipton (both of whom were irl very married and not to each other, natch) their opinions about the show (Speirs died in 2007, Lipton in '01) but there does seem to be something there. I mean, it isn't just me having slash glasses on, there's plenty of close friendships on the show (and irl) that don't seem remotely romantic to me, but Speirs and Lipton are shown as having practically a martial meet-cute. It's all very heroic.

But anyhow, I have fallen into a new fandom and cannot get out. Send supplies and reinforcements.